Colombia’s Hired Assassins: Their Only Skill Is Killing : Drugs: Prestige, gang membership, girlfriends and money--for a boy living in poverty, all can be had by pulling the trigger.

Carlos Pizarro became a walking corpse the moment he decided to campaign for the Colombian presidency. None of his compatriots were surprised when he was killed in a storm of bullets April 26. His was another death foretold.

Who killed Carlos Pizarro? He had many enemies.

As the chief of one of the most effective guerrilla groups--the M-19--he had long ago been branded a public enemy by the police and army. As a legal Marxist presidential candidate--after M-19 made peace with the government in March--he became an open target of the ultra-right and its paramilitary forces. As a reformed guerrilla, he became a traitor in the eyes of those who continue the armed struggle. As the leader of a new and popular alternative opposition party, he made mainstream politicians nervous. Finally, as a charismatic and handsome public figure, he was attractive prey for the narco-terrorist campaign now under way in Colombia. The people behind the murder of Pizarro, three other presidential candidates and hundreds of public and private Colombians surely will never be discovered. A curtain of fear will protect them.

But whoever ordered the murder, the killer is the same: a boy without ideology or politics, without past or future, whose only skill is killing. In Colombia, he is known as a sicario , a hired assassin.

Medellin was one of Colombia’s most modern and prosperous cities in the early ‘70s. Its climate was exceptional, its residents hard-working, its economy flourishing. As a center of development and economic hope in a poor country, however, it attracted the unemployed, the forgotten, the hopeless.

A subculture of poverty took root in the emerald mountains around the city. There, ignored by God and law, families destroyed by unemployment, domestic violence and alcoholism gave birth to the sicario .

From early studies by sociologists, psychologists and journalists, a general profile of the sicario can be drawn.

He lives peaceably with his neighbors, staying in the neighborhood even when he becomes wealthy. He adores his mother, on whom he spends much of what he earns. He may still be a student. He does not use drugs or alcohol. He has suffered hunger and generally been a victim of his father’s violence.

The number of deaths he has caused gives him prestige, membership in a gang, the love and respect of girls and, in many cases, money to buy the clothes, music and guns he admires.

“They are creatures from pure urban roots, born amid the noise of high-powered motorcycles and machine guns, grown in the shadow of easy money and the fever of consumerism,” wrote journalist Laura Restrepo.

The first signs of the sicario phenomenon appeared a decade ago. Groups of armed civilians were organized in the regions most affected by guerrilla violence. They were known as “health brigades.” A government investigation revealed that these groups were supported and financed by well-known and wealthy ranchers and businessmen. They had the blessing and protection of the army.

The groups’ self-imposed duty was to “clean” entire regions of guerrillas and their collaborators. But as their operations expanded, the voluntary financial support became insufficient. At the time, the narcotics traffickers were buying their way into ranching. Their “contributions” to the brigades were welcomed.

The brigades moved into other regions, their organizations growing more sophisticated. Schools for sicarios taught the fine art of killing. The curricula included courses in camouflage, weapons, target shooting, personal defense, intelligence and counterintelligence, communications and first aid.

The major traffickers founded their own killing schools to satisfy their personal needs. Many of the students organized their own groups. The new and prosperous industry of death features private cars, weapons, planes, boats, helicopters, airports, computers and, of course, unlimited access to money.

Colombia’s deteriorating economic situation, meanwhile, forces more boys and young men into the streets. Easy money for “quick jobs”--murders--is all the more desirable. In Medellin, center of the narcotics industry, bands of sicarios mushroomed in the poor mountain neighborhoods. These boys are self-taught. They do not want to become amuraos --jobless people who spend their days leaning against walls. Officials have tallied more than 300 bands of sicarios , with an average of 10 members each, in Medellin.

Although economics largely explains the attraction of the killing life, why the killer of Pizarro chose to do the deed on a plane in flight, full of armed bodyguards, remains elusive. Age is one suggested reason. Gang members are rarely older than 17. They are too young and immature to understand the gravity of their actions. But even a young boy would know that if he confronts 12 bodyguards in a plane, he will die.

Since their birth, death has been a daily fixture for these kids. In their Medellin neighborhoods, there are, on average, 25 murders a day. A generation does not know that people can die as a result of old age, illness or other natural causes.

Killing comes easily because these boys see no value in their own lives. The way they live and act--and the desperation that surrounds them--is half of what in Colombia is known as “la cultura de la muerte” (the culture of death).

As in any profession, the bands of young killers develop and abide by an ethics code. An assassination is simply “a job.” Dying is desirable if it comes in the line of duty.

There are plenty of examples. In “No Future,” a Colombian documentary about sicarios , a scene shows the young colleagues of a felled assassin filing by the coffin, each congratulating the victim for a good death. “You were valiant, brother,” one says. “You died according to our law.”

When a young man murdered the head of a leftist party and wounded a leading presidential candidate in the Bogota airport in 1989, he was filmed by security cameras jumping with joy next to the bodies--as if he were a soccer player who had just scored the winning goal. He made no attempt to escape. Seconds later, bodyguards mowed him down with automatic gunfire.

Religion and love for mother also are woven into these boys’ lives. Many assassins are known to attend confession and ask for God’s protection and help before doing a job. Some have been seen making the sign of the cross moments before firing. And on many of the bodies of dead sicarios are Catholic medallions inscribed with the images of saints or the Virgin Mary. Some have tattoos that read “God and Mother.”

Many sicarios say they do their work for their mothers. As the breadwinner in single-parent homes, he is husband, father and son.

“I am going to die,” said one 15-year-old assassin in an interview. “But my mother will remember me because I gave her a beautiful new refrigerator.”

The complicity of a terrified society and an emasculated government, combined with the immeasurable wealth of the drug traffickers, nourish the phenomenon of sicarios . Many Colombians believe that the growing and widespread tolerance of violent death permeates their society. Public tolerance is the other half of the culture of death that prevails in Colombia.

Only a national effort can save a vibrant culture that existed long before death began taking over.